You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

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Can't Spell Asshole Without A.S.

No, wait. That is insufficient and imprecise. After all, we're dealing with the Supreme Court here - the highest deliberative body in the land, the nine individuals who turn their keen, legally-trained minds upon the most vital issues of the day and hand down final, unchallengable rulings. As a member of that body, Scalia deserves better than "dumb".

Antonin Scalia, you are an asshole. But not just any asshole. You are an asshole so huge, so gaping, so prolapsed that even the most depraved websites on the Internet would balk at using your picture to shock and disgust your users. You're more than an asshole. You're like a dimensional gateway to the colon of some vast, angry Lovecraftian god. You're like the asshole of Galactus, designed to handle the stresses of the digestive detritus of a being that devours worlds. You are the apex predator of assholes. The alpha asshole, who stands proudly while all the other assholes sniff you, whimper, and sulk under tree branches. Yours is the Rectum Sanctorum*.

I am speaking, of course, of the recent 5-4 decision overturning the Military Commissions Act and the unconscionable removal of habeas corpus rights from "enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay, the men that we have locked up and tortured for nearly six years without charges or trials, on the grounds that some of them might be dangerous terrorists. Scalia, the Sphincter Supreme, was on the losing side of this one, which does two things. It makes me smile, and it makes me emphasize one more time that anyone not voting against John McCain this November might as well pack up their stuff and buy a brand new condo currently being built inside the titanium-clad walls of Antonin Scalia's asshole, because whomever John McCain appoints to the court will not be able to keep Scalia neutralized.

Scalia is such an asshole that even in defeat, he managed to say things so egregiously stupid and poop-chutey that just reading them gave me a case of hysterical blindness. I hope you're made of stronger stuff than I, because it's ASSHOLE QUOTE TIME!

"Most tragically it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving in a civilian court ... that evidence supports the confinement of each and every prisoner."

I've been following our country's exciting adventures in gulags for a while now, and I've never seen anything quite as explicitly galling as this. Scalia, in this one sentence, admits that the United States is holding detainees without enough evidence to support their detention. And that it is completely unreasonable, nay, TRAGIC, that we demand such a thing. Coming from a Rush Limbaugh, this would be obscene. Coming from Ann Coulter, it would be, well, the latest thing Ann Coulter said when she realized people weren't paying enough attention to her. But this is from a Supreme Court justice.

This is from a man whose lifetime vocation is to listen to EVIDENCE. Who makes decisions that affect millions of lives every year, ostensibly based on EVIDENCE. And here he is, dismissing evidence as an insurmountable obstacle to doing whatever the fuck you want to whoever the fuck you want under the guise of "keeping us safe". It's an outright rejection of his entire purpose. And he tosses it off almost casually, not even bothering to shroud it in legalese or disguise it as an intellectual exercise. Man, what an asshole.

Scalia was such an asshole here that he eclipsed John Roberts, Chief Justice, head judge of all nine head judges of the entire country, when he said, in HIS dissenting opinion, what would have been one of the assholiest things in the history of the court, but is now relegated to a distant second place:

"[The American people] lost a bit more control over the conduct of this nation's foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.".

Did you see that? That, right there, is a Republican talking point demonizing the judicial branch of government, uttered by the titular leader of the JUDICIAL FUCKING BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT. Of all the unelected, politically unaccountable judges in the land, John Roberts is the unelectedest, and the most politically unaccountable. But he is apparently so devoted to the ideology that put him in that job that he's willing to undermine himself in order to further it. That is some serious fucking self-loathing right there, that is. Democrats gained so much by not daring to filibuster his nomination. Thanks, assholes.